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State v. Basabe8/16/2004
t a prison term entails.'" Soderna, 82 F.3d at 1378 (quoting Nachtigal, 507 U.S. at 5, 113 S.Ct. at 1074).
Relying on the letter and spirit of Blanton and Nachtigal, the Soderna court held that the maximum penalty authorized under FACE for a first offense -- up to six months' imprisonment and a fine of up to $10,000 -- did not render the underlying offense constitutionally serious. The court acknowledged that a particularly severe monetary penalty could convert a petty offense into a serious one, but determined that $10,000 did not approach the requisite level of severity:
If the fine for a first-time [offense] were $1 million, it would be hard to resist the inference that the offense was serious rather than petty. [However, w]e need not decide where between $5,000 and $1 million the line should be drawn. It is enough that, in light of the reasoning of Blanton and Nachtigal, it cannot be drawn at $10,000.
Soderna, 82 F.3d at 1379. We agree with the Soderna court. The maximum penalty of $10,000 authorized under HRS § 266-25[ (1993)], particularly when considering that the statute authorizes no term of imprisonment, does not tend to move a violation of Rule 19-62-17 from the realm of a petty into that of a serious offense.
Ford, 84 Hawaii at 72-73, 929 P.2d at 85-86 (some brackets in the original) (footnote omitted).
Similarly, we subscribe to the supreme court's "strongly-held view" that "penalties such as probation or a fine may engender a significant infringement of personal freedom, but they cannot approximate in severity the loss of liberty that a prison term entails." Sullivan, 97 Hawaii at 267, 36 P.3d at 811 (brackets, citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). Accordingly, we do not believe Basabe's violation of HAR § 13-60.3-3, even if it did indeed involve an $18,000 fine significantly beyond the frontier of monetary fines heretofore examined by our appellate courts, is the "extraordinary case where consideration of the mix of penalties unequivocally demonstrates that society demands that persons charged with the offense at issue be afforded the right to a jury trial." Sullivan, 97 Hawaii at 267, 36 P.3d at 811 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore hold that Basabe did not have a right to a jury trial under our Hawaii Constitution.
III. Conclusion
The district court's October 2, 2002 judgment is affirmed.
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